Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Chapter 75

The Right Whale’s Head — Contrasted View

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the the Right Whale’s head.

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where
it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a
gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last.
And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
lodged, she and all her progeny.

But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your point of view. If
you stand on its summit and look at these two f-shaped spout-holes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass
viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its soundingboard. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
crested, comblike incrustation on the top of the mass — this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the
“crown,” and the Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the
head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs
that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been
fixed by the technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how
this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this
marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that
hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet
long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably
the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.
Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should
take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve
feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched,
hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a
side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere
been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains
the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in
feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks,
curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular
rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability.
At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem
reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas
calls them the wondrous “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;16 another,
“hogs’ bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: “There are about two hundred
and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”

16 This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of
whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the
lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.

As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to
the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long been on the
decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as
those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the
like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the
same bone.

But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you
afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the
great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey
— the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in
pieces in hoisting it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a
six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with — that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale
have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory
teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of
those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.

Look your last now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink,
unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer
wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a
speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an
enormous practical resolution facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian,
who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.